Tracking a request's flow across different components in distributed systems is essential. With the rise of microservices, their importance has risen to critical levels. Some proprietary tools for tracking have been used already: Jaeger and Zipkin naturally come to mind.

Observability is built on three pillars: logging, metrics, and tracing. OpenTelemetry is a joint effort to bring an open standard to them. Jaeger and Zipkin joined the effort so that they are now OpenTelemetry compatible.

In this talk, I'll describe the above in more detail and showcase a (simple) use case to demo how you could benefit from OpenTelemetry in your distributed architecture.

Nicolas Frankel is a technologist focusing on cloud-native technologies, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and system observability. His focus revolves around creating technical content, delivering talks, and engaging with developer communities to promote the adoption of modern software practices. With a strong background in software, he has worked extensively with the JVM, applying his expertise across various industries. In addition to his technical work, he is the author of several books and regularly shares insights through his blog and open-source contributions.